Monday, October 12, 2015

IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 13/10/2015

ASUS Announces the ROG Maximus VIII Impact Z170 Motherboard

At the initial Skylake launch, we provided a rundown of all the Z170 motherboards
we could get information on from the major motherboard manufacturers.
Even with details on over 55 motherboards, there were some noticeable
parts missing from that list as we were told to expect more as the
platform developed. The Maximus VIII Impact from ASUS is one of those to
come a couple of months after the initial launch, and builds on the
previous Impact products from the Republic of Gamers brand.

As
with other Impact motherboards, the major difference between it and
other mini-ITX motherboards is the power delivery on a right-angled
daughter board at the top. This allows ASUS to provide a larger power
sub-system, cool it appropriately, and over the multi-generational
iterative design we are told the power losses involved with this method
are continually minimised. From the images it is difficult to make out,
but the Z170 generation of the Impact comes with a rear metal guard
(look on the right hand side and over the motherboard screw hole in the
top right corner). Presumably this is either for rigidity or for extra
PWM cooling. Also as with other Impact designs, the power connectors are
on the right hand side of the board, outside the DRAM slots, to make
them easier to access for cable management. Underneath this is the front
IO panel, a fan header and a USB 3.0 header from the chipset.

Being
a mini-ITX board, there is really only space for two DRAM slots, and
the Impact uses dual DDR4 slots with single-sided latches and support
for 32GB and DDR4-4133. The latches for the slots are on the PCIe side
due to the power delivery daughterboard, which might make DRAM removal
with large GPUs installed more difficult. Inside the DRAM slots are four
SATA 6 Gbps ports, but storage is aided by a U.2 connector near the
rear panel. This is done due to the size of the U.2 connector, and it’s
great to have the functionality, though it does mean that SSD 750 owners
will be routing the cable over the motherboard to get to it in most
cases. Back at the launch of the Z170 chipset, after the SSD 750 had
been out for a month, I spoke to motherboard manufacturers about
actually replacing SATA Express with U.2 onboard – here’s one of the
first examples (there are a couple of others).

The last
generation Impact came with an additional daughterboard for extra fan
headers, to aid the two already on the motherboard. Here, instead of
that daughterboard, we get the EXT_FAN header in the top right which is a
breakout connector to a separate PCB containing fan headers and power.
When talking to ASUS about this on previous designs, the move towards
the fact that Impact owners tend to have customized systems, so having
this option allows them to have a more configurable system design.

While
we don’t have HDMI 2.0 here, ASUS seems to be using Intel’s Alpine
Ridge controller to provide two USB 3.1 ports at 10 Gbps with type-A and
type-C support. There are two Intel ICs next to the USB 3.1 ports, the
smaller of which is the network controller and the larger seems to be
the Alpine Ridge and is similar to other implementations – there isn’t
an ASMedia controller nearby at any rate. This would be one of the first
times we’ve seen the Alpine Ridge controller outside of GIGABYTE
boards, perhaps suggesting that their launch day exclusivity has now
come to an end. ASUS also puts on the board an Intel I219-V network
controller, a 2x2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi Go module, and their SupremeFX
Impact III daughterboard audio solution, now encased in a full EM shield
and with LED-illuminated audio jacks and headphone impedance
detection/adjustment up to 600 ohms. The rear panel also supports BIOS
flashback, four USB 3.0 ports, and their Impact Control III
information/control panel.

Because this information is
from the ROG team and not an ASUS regional office, pricing and
availability is not yet known. Although typically an ROG team
announcement in the past has become a 2-4 week lead time to US
deployment in the past, and previous Impact motherboards have been in
the $230-$280 area.

A
year ago, several veterans of SSD controller design firms SandForce and
Link_A_Media Devices formed a new startup called Tidal Systems, Inc. to
focus on developing NVMe SSD controllers. Tidal has spent the past year
operating in stealth mode, and their website has almost no information about the company's work.

Over
this past week, during a financial call to investors, it was announced
that Tidal has now been acquired by Micron. There are no details
available regarding the acquisition and Micron reported their quarterly
results just before the acquisition so we won't get any more information
soon. On the technical side, Micron plans to fold Tidal into their
Advanced Controller Group and use Tidal controllers in client PCIe SSDs.

While
the news that the acquisition has been floating around for a few days,
we wanted more and so contacted Micron's PR to get further information
about the acquisition. Ultimately we were told very little as the
details are being kept under wraps for the time being. We were told
that the acquisition includes Tidal's "inventory, equipment and
intellectual property rights"; not mentioned in our discussions with
Micron were the key people involved in developing Tidal's technology.
Some amount of staff turnover during an acquisition is normal, and we'll
have to wait and see who stays with Micron or gets put up the chain.
Neither company has given an indication of how close to market Tidal's
controller/controllers (we don't even know how many are involved
here) may be, so it is difficult to gauge how much of an impact, both in
terms of technology and personnel, this acquisition will have.

This
acquisition is motivated by Micron's desire to develop high-end client
SSDs without being dependent on third-party controllers from Marvell or
others. This would give Micron more opportunity for product
differentiation and keep more of the design in-house. This is becoming
important as consolidation takes place - vertical integration of the SSD
business has been working out very well for Samsung and Intel, and the
industry has seen a lot of the consolidation ethos in recent years.
Micron's acquisition leaves SanDisk as the only NAND manufacturer that
doesn't do in-house controller design for the client SSD market, so it's
likely that they're is sizing up the remaining independent SSD
controller vendors.

Today
ASUS announced two new gaming monitors at their Republic of Gamers
Unleashed event in San Francisco. Both displays are 27" IPS panels,
although there are some significant differences between the two that
make each one appeal more or less for certain genres of games. Below you
can find all the relevant specifications for both of ASUS's new
monitors.

ASUS PG279Q

ASUS PG27AQ

Resolution

2560x1440

3840x2160

Panel Size

27"

Panel Type

WLED + IPS

Refresh Rate

144Hz (OC 165Hz)

60Hz

Contrast Ratio

1000:1

Peak Brightness

350 nits

300 nits

Response Time (GtG)

4ms

Viewing Angle (H/V)

178° / 178°

Inputs and Outputs

DisplayPort 1.2

HDMI 1.4

2x USB 3.0

3.5mm audio

Color Depth

16.7 million (8bit)

1.07 billion (10bit)

Speakers

2x 2W Stereo

Other Features

NVIDIA G-Sync

NVIDIA Ultra Low Motion Blur

NVIDIA G-Sync

Price

$799

N/A

Starting with the PG279Q, we see that it's a 27"
WQHD IPS panel with a refresh rate of 144Hz. This monitor is definitely
targeted more toward gamers who play games like first person shooters
where a high refresh rate is a greater asset than a higher resolution.
When paired with a GTX 960 or faster NVIDIA GPU the display's refresh
rate can be boosted up to 165Hz, and ASUS has even included a button on
the monitor to switch between the two refresh rates on command. This is
actually more useful then it sounds, because a user can easily move to
165Hz while gaming, and stick with 144Hz in typical use which will also
eliminate telecine judder in 24fps video content.

As
for the PG27AQ, I would imagine that gamers who play RTS and simulation
games would choose it over the PG279Q for its higher resolution. It's a
27" UHD panel with a refresh rate of 60Hz, and a greater 10bit color
depth than the PG279Q's 8bit color. It shares most of the remaining
specifications with the PG279Q, including a contrast ratio of 1000:1, a
4ms grey to grey response time, a 178 degree viewing angle on both axis,
and the inputs and outputs listed above.

Both of these
new monitors feature NVIDIA's G-Sync adaptive refresh rate technology.
Even on the PG27AQ this can be useful despite it only being a 60Hz
panel, as it will produce a much more fluid image if a game's frame rate
drops below 60fps than a non G-Sync / FreeSync display. However, only
the PG279Q has NVIDIA's Ultra Low Motion Blur technology which uses a
strobing backlight to reduce motion blur. It's worth noting that G-Sync
and ULMB are mutually exclusive and you need to choose which one you
want a game to use based on whether or not you can maintain the PG279Q's
native refresh rate of 144/165Hz.

The ASUS PG279Q will
be available in November, with a starting price of $799 in the United
States. Pricing and availability for the PG27AQ is currently unknown,
but I would imagine that the price will be in the same realm as the
PG279Q.

Western Digital My Cloud Mirror Gen 2 Review
Western
Digital is well known to the average consumer as a hard drive
manufacturer. By extension, it also opens up the network-attached
storage (NAS) market to them. In 2014, the company unified their
embedded Linux-based offerings under the My Cloud tag. The My Cloud
Mirror units targeted home users, while the EX 2-bay and 4-bay units
targeted prosumers and small office / home office (SOHO) installations.
For business users, the DL series was introduced earlier this year. A
few weeks back, Western Digital announced an updated operating system
for the My Cloud units - My Cloud OS 3. Along with that, the My Cloud
Mirror Gen 2 was also introduced. WD sent us the 4TB version for review.
Read on to see how the unit stacks up against the competitors in this
space.

Since we first learned that the A9 SoC in Apple’s iPhone 6s lineup is dual sourced
- that is that it's being made by two different vendors with two
distinct manufacturing processes - one major question has remained in
the process of reviewing these two phones. The main issue under question
here is whether the TSMC A9 or Samsung A9 have any difference in
performance and power consumption. If there is a difference, the
question then becomes whether the difference is significant.

With
the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are
getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we
ship meets Apple's highest standards for providing incredible
performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s
capacity, color, or model.

Certain manufactured lab
tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until
the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since
they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance
state. It's a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our
testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s
and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component
differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.

It
interesting to see this response as Apple normally doesn’t comment on
anything like this, which in turn is likely a good indicator of how
seriously Apple is taking any concerns. However, this statement is also
of interest because it's revealing in terms of what internal data Apple
has collected on the issue. Apple has in recent years been one of the
better companies in accurately promoting the battery life of their
products, and that kind of accuracy comes not only from taking a
conservative (safe) stance in marketing, but also collecting massive
amounts of data to understand their products and their capabilities.

The Test

To
get to the meat of matters then, let's talk about battery life, tests,
chips, and statistics. In terms of the testing that has seemingly
spurred on this Apple response, it’s likely that the “manufactured lab
tests” in the statement refer directly to Primate Labs’ GeekBench
battery life benchmark. The GeekBench test runs parts of the GeekBench
CPU benchmark in a loop, making sure to do a fixed amount of work per
time interval while idling the rest of the time, and using the score
result as a modifier for the runtime score. This makes the GeekBench
battery life benchmark primarily a SoC/CPU/Memory benchmark, and that in
turn has repercussions for interpreting the data.

In
the case of our own web browsing battery life test, for example, this
is a test that attempts to simulate light reading of web pages, meaning
that the SoC is only working hard a fraction of the time. The vast
majority of the time the SoC is idling, making the display the biggest
power consumer; and this is especially the case on these latest
generations of high performance flagship smartphones. A heavy test on
the other hand would be a test that keeps a sustained and significant
load on the CPU and GPU, which shifts the power consumption of a test
from the display to the SoC.

An Example of the Wide Gulf Between Light and Heavy Battery Life Testing

Due
to the nature of its use of fixed size workloads, the GeekBench battery
life benchmark lies somewhere in between a heavy load and a light load
(Primate Labs states it's around 30% on the 6s). And this is notable
because if this is the case, it means that GeekBench is in fact
highlighting the difference in power consumption between the TSMC and
Samsung A9s. However as Apple points out in their statement, a sustained
workload is not necessarily representative of what real world usage is
like, with the real world having a burst of of different types of
workloads. This doesn't mean GeekBench doesn't return valuable data,
however it means we're looking at a slice of a bigger picture.
Ultimately if there is a difference between the TSMC and Samsung A9s,
then it means that GeekBench is likely to be exacerbating the difference
versus what a real world mixed use case test would see.

The Chips

As
for the data itself, due to the fact that GeekBench is a heavier
workload, it means that there are a number of factors that could explain
why battery life in this test shows such a large difference, and not
all of these factors are easy to account for. With the chips themselves,
it could be that the Samsung A9 variant is simply reaching higher
average temperatures due to its smaller die size (same heat over a
smaller area), which then accordingly affects power draw due to the
nature of semiconductor physics (increased leakage). It doesn’t have to
be at the point where the workload is causing thermal throttling, but
even a sustained load for significant periods of time could be enough to
cause this effect, as the CPU will reach higher temperatures even if
the phone is cool to the touch.

An example of the temperature versus power consumption principle on
an Intel Core i7-2600K. Image Credit: AT Forums User "Idontcare"

Given
the nature of chip manufacturing, it’s also hard to say one way or
another whether an individual chip and phone pair will have better or
worse battery life than another chip and phone pair. This is a pretty
complicated subject, but it basically boils down to the difficulty of
injecting exactly a certain number of ions into a small part of the
silicon wafer or depositing a layer of insulator that meets an exact
thickness. This results in chip manufacturing quality being distribution
based - a wafer will come out of production with individual chips of
varying quality, with some chips operating at lower voltages or lower
leakages than others, and other chips being altogether defective. This
is colloquially known as the "silicon lottery."

It's
then from these chips that a customer (e.g. Apple) needs to made
tradeoffs between how "poor" of a chip they are willing to accept and
how many chips per wafer they'd like to be able to use from each wafer
(the yield). In doing so, a customer will set minimum tolerances,
certain parameters that a chip needs to meet to be qualified. However as
these are minimums, it means that a customer will also receive chips
that exceed these minimums, as we can see in our completely fictitious
chart below.

A completely fictitious processor quality distribution example. Chips
in the white area are used, outlying chips in red areas are rejected

In
the case of someone like Intel, they will bin these passing chips as
different products (Core i3/i5/i7) and different clockspeeds to charge
the most for the best chips. However since Apple currently only uses at
most two bins of chips (those suitable for 6s and those suitable for 6s
Plus), this means there is a wider variation in the chips used in each
phone. As a result, even if there isn't a true and consistent difference
between TSMC and Samsung for A9 SoCs, you could easily have a pair of
phones where due to the silicon lottery there is a notable - though not
extreme - difference in power consumption.

This
variation is an expected part of chip manufacturing, and while Apple
could disqualify more chips and thereby reduce the yield, they will
always have a certain degree of variation. The key here is to set
rigorous minimums, advertise a phone based on those minimums (e.g.
battery life), and should a customer end up with a phone, then they have
won the silicon lottery in this case.

The Statistics

So
how does one compare phones when there's a natural variance in chip
quality? Ideally it would be done just like Apple does, testing a large
number of phones (chips) for power consumption and battery life to
determine the distribution. Otherwise if we only test one TSMC A9 and
one Samsung A9, we don't know where in the distribution each A9 lies,
and consequently whether each phone is a representative "average" sample
or not.

Of course this is easier said than done, as
the greater the accuracy desired the greater the number of iPhones
required, a bill that at $650/$750 a unit adds up quickly. This makes it
incredibly impractical for any one group short of a large corporate
competitive analysis team to get enough samples, especially since at the
press level Apple only distributes one phone of each type (for a total
of 2) to each press organization. In lieu of that, typically the best
one can do is look at a small number of samples, which offers some data
to account for variance, but not much.

This
brings us back to where we started with GeekBench. As part of the
GeekBench benchmark, results are uploaded to Primate Labs' servers, where they are available for browsing.
I've had a couple of people ask whether these results are a collective
whole - in essence crowdsourced benchmarking - can answer anything, and
the answer to that is a "yes, but" kind of scenario.

The
big problem right now is that GeekBench doesn't know what model
processor is being tested, so there's no way to sort out TSMC versus
Samsung. Update: And as if right on cue, the same day we publish
this GeekBench 3.4 makes it through the iOS app store approval process,
adding the ability for GeekBench to tell which processor is in a phone.

Even
if there was, we'd get to matters of testing rigor. How bright is the
screen on each phone? Are there any background tasks running? Is it in
airplane mode or spending power talking on WiFi/cellular? With Geekbench
running at on average just a 30% duty cycle, these are all potential
power consumers that can significantly impact the resulting battery
life. In turn, these are all things that are accounted for in formal
testing, but they cannot reliably be accounted for in benchmarks run by
the wider public. This as a result adds even more variance to the
equation, which makes individual or even small groups of results
potentially very inaccurate.

The Conclusion

Wrapping
things up then, where do we stand? The short answer is that all we know
is that we don't know. What we know is that there isn't enough
information currently out there to accurately determine whether the TSMC
or Samsung A9 SoC has better power consumption, and more importantly
just how large any difference might be. 1-on-1 comparisons under controlled conditions can provide us with some
insight in to how the TSMC and Samsung A9s compare, but due to the
natural variation in chip quality, it's possible to end up testing two
atypical phones and never know it.

To
that end I suspect that Apple's statement is not all that far off. They
are of course one of the few parties able to actually analyze a large
number of phones, and perhaps more to the point, having a wide variation
in battery life on phones - even if every phone meets the minimum
specifications - is not a great thing for Apple. It can cause buyers to
start hunting down phones with "golden" A9s, and make other buyers feel
like they've been swindled by not receiving an A9 with as low the power
consumption as someone else. To be clear there will always be some
variance and this is normal and expected, but if Apple has done their
homework they should have it well understood and reasonably narrow. The
big risk to Apple is that dual sourcing A9s in this fashion makes that
task all the harder, which is one of the reasons why SoCs are rarely
dual sourced.

As for AnandTech, we'll continue digging
into the matter. Unfortunately all of the iPhones we've received and
purchased so far have used TSMC A9s - it's a silicon lottery, after all -
but whether there is a real and consistent difference between the TSMC
and Samsung A9s is a very interesting question and one we're still
looking to ultimately be able to address.

Dell XPS Lineup Is Reinvigorated With Skylake On The New XPS 12, XPS 13, And XPS 15

Dell
really put their stamp on the 2015 Ultrabook lineup this year with the
Dell XPS 13 with its amazing Infinity Display. They packed a 13.3-inch
display into a notebook that would normally house something closer to
11-inches, and no other manufacturer has come close to it this year.
Performance was great, battery life was the new benchmark, and other
than a couple of foibles such as a camera that points up at your chin,
and some aggressive use of Content Adaptive Backlight Control (CABC)
there was very little to complain about on the XPS 13. Today, Dell is
refreshing the XPS 13 with Skylake, and trying to bring the same amazing
design to the XPS 15 and the new XPS 12 2-in-1.

XPS 13

Let’s
start with the XPS 13, which should be familiar to anyone who read my
review of it. Dell has tried to take the XPS 13 and push it to the next
level, and they are starting with Skyake. Dell will offer Core i3-6100U
all the way up to Core i7-6600U. This means the GPU will be the Intel HD
520 model, so no Iris options on the XPS 13 range unfortunately. Memory
options start at 4 GB and go up to 16 GB of LPDDR3, and storage gets a
bump too. The base 128 GB model is still a SATA based SSD, but the 256
GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB models are all PCIe versions. These are
evolutionary updates, but the move to Skylake has also given Dell the
opportunity to add Thunderbolt 3 to the XPS 13 through a USB Type-C
which also supports 10 Gbps USB, VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, and charging.

Battery
life was a pretty big part of the Broadwell based XPS 13, and on the
1080p model we got over 15 hours on our light workload. The move to
Skylake looks to move that bar even further out with Dell saying the new
model is rated at up to 18 hours.

Yes, it is an evolutionary update, but it is an evolutionary update of one of the best notebooks of 2015 so far.

XPS 15

For
those that prefer a larger notebook, the XPS 15 has been around for a
while now, but when we saw it refreshed back at CES, it was still in the
2014 chassis. Today Dell has brought the look and feel of the Infinity
Display to the XPS 15. They have squeezed a 15.6-inch display into the
body of a 14-inch notebook. Let’s talk about that display too. It is an
Ultrasharp 4K Ultra HD model, which comes in at 282 pixels per inch and
has a 350-nit brightness rating. The 4K model also covers 100% of the
Adobe RGB color space which is a wider gamut than the typical sRGB space
of most notebooks. It offers PremierColor Software as well to remap the
smaller sRGB space into Adobe RGB so that colors are not portrayed
incorrectly when viewing sRGB content.

The XPS 15 has
been the model where Dell steps up the performance to a quad-core
version, and despite the smaller chassis due to the Infinity Display
that has not changed. The base model comes with the Intel Core i3-6100H
which is a dual-core 35 Watt part, but you can also get the i5-6300HQ
and i7-6700HQ which are both quad-core 45 Watt CPUs. Up to 32 GB of DDR4
is available through two SODIMM slots, and the XPS 15 offers a discrete
NVIDIA GTX 960M GPU as well. You can get the XPS 15 with a spinning
drive if you want (I wouldn’t recommend it) or, like the XPS 13, Dell
offers PCIe SSDs up to 1 TB. Dell is offering either a 56 Wh or 84 Wh
battery, and the larger battery on the 1080p version of the XPS 15 is
rated for up to 17 hours. For those that need faster wireless
connectivity, Dell also offers a 3x3 802.11ac wireless card. Like the
XPS 13, it also features Thunderbolt 3 through Type-C. One thing you do
lose by moving to a 14-inch chassis is the room for a dedicated number
pad.

XPS 12

The
final XPS model announced today is the XPS 12, which is a 2-in-1 tablet
with a docking keyboard. Think of this as Dell’s take on the Surface
Pro, but Dell has taken a couple of different paths than Microsoft did
on their 2-in-1 tablet. First, the display is a 3840x2160 UHD with a
smartphone level 352 pixels per inch and 400 nits of brightness and 100%
Adobe RGB. There is also a 1080p model with sRGB coverage which should
help with battery life. Dell has gone with the latest Skylake version of
Core m to power this tablet, with the m5-6Y54 processor which turbos up
to 2.7 GHz. 8 GB of LPDDR3 memory is available, and you can get either
128 GB of 256 GB of SATA SSD storage. Keeping all of this powered is a
30 Wh battery.

We tested the Dell Venue 11 7000, which
was similar to this in that it had a docking keyboard, but the keyboard
added a lot of weight due to the extra battery inside. Dell has taken a
different approach here and the keyboard base only adds just under a
pound to the 1.75 lb tablet. The keyboard on the Venue 11 7000 was also
not great, and the XPS 12 is offering a full size backlit keyboard with
1.3 mm of key travel, which should be a lot better. The trackpad is a
glass precision trackpad.

The device itself is made of a magnesium alloy and covered in soft touch paint, and the display has Corning Gorilla Glass NBT.

Dell
seems to have gone all-in on Thunderbolt, with this tablet featuring
not one but two Type-C connectors with Thunderbolt 3. The 45 Watt A/C
adapter also connects over the Type-C, and it is great to see Dell
embracing this to get rid of the myriad of proprietary charging
connectors that have plagued PCs for decades.

Dell XPS

XPS 12

XPS 13

XPS 15

CPU

Intel Core m5-6Y54 (1.1-2.7 GHz dual-core 4.5W Skylake)

Intel Core i3-6100U (2.3 GHz dual-core 15W Skylake)

Intel Core i5-6200U (2.3-2.8 GHz dual-core 15W Skylake)

(January)Intel Core i5-6300U (2.4-3.0 GHz dual-core 15W Skylake)

Intel Core i7-6500U (2.5-3.1 GHz dual-core 15W Skylake)

(January)Intel Core i7-6600U (2.6-3.4 GHz dual-core 15W Skylake)

Intel Core i3-6100H (2.7 GHz dual-core 35W Skylake)

Intel Core i5-6300HQ (2.3-3.2 GHz quad-core 45W Skylake)

Intel Core i7-6700HQ (2.6-3.5 GHz quad-core 45W Skylake)

GPU

Intel HD 515

Intel HD 520

Intel HD 530

NVIDIA GTX 960M

Memory

8 GB dual-channel LPDDR3-1600

4-16 GB dual-channel LPDDR3-1866

8-32 GB dual-channel DDR4-2133

Display

12.5" 1920x1080 sRGB

12.5" 3840x2160 Adobe RGB

13.3" 1920x1080 sRGB

13.3" 3200x1800 sRGB

15.6" 1920x1080 sRGB

15.6" 3840x2160 Adobe RGB

Storage

128-256 GB SATA SSD

128 GB SATA SSD, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB PCIe SSD

500 GB - 1 GB HDD, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB PCIe SSD

Battery

30 Wh

56 Wh

56 Wh

84 Wh

Ports

Thunderbolt 3 x 2 (Type-C)

Headset

SD Card Reader

Thunderbolt 3 x 1 (Type-C)

USB 3.0 x 2

Headset

SD Card Reader

Thunderbolt 3 x 1 (Type-C)

USB 3.0 x 2

Headset

HDMI

SD Card Reader

Dimensions

Tablet:

291 x 193 x 8 mm

11.46 x 7.6 x 0.31 inches

Tablet plus Keyboard:

291 x 198 x 16-25 mm

11.46 x 7.8 x 0.63-0.99 inches

304 x 200 x 9-15 mm

11.98 x 7.88 x 0.33-0.6 inches

357 x 235 x 11-17 mm

14.06 x 9.27 x 0.45-0.66 inches

Weight

Tablet:

790 g

1.75 lbs

Tablet plus Keyboard:

1.27 kg

2.8 lbs

1.2 - 1.29 kg

2.7 - 2.9 lbs

1.78 - 2.0 kg

3.9 - 4.4 lbs

Price

$999+

$799+

$999+

Dell was already at the forefront this year with
their notebook design, so it’s great to see them take that same design
and apply it to the XPS 15. The XPS 12 looks to be a decent tablet with a
good looking keyboard dock, and that has been one of the biggest issues
with convertible tablets with attachable docks so I am excited to see
this in person and give it a try. The notebooks will be available on
Dell.com starting today, and the tablet will be coming in November.

Readers
of our mini-PC reviews would have noticed that our routine involves
detailed power consumption tests. Ensuring a level playing field for all
the units involves turning off automatic Windows updates (so that we
don't have unnecessary processes taking up CPU cycles or downloading of
updates consuming network bandwidth and driving up the idle power
consumption). On Windows 8.1 and earlier versions, turning off automatic
updates was trivial, but Windows 10 presents some challenges.

Our review of the ECS LIVA Core (published yesterday)
was the first to make use of Windows 10. Turning off updates in Windows
10 Professional is not too difficult using the Group Policy editor, but
Windows 10 Home has only one way
to prevent updates from getting downloaded - by setting the network
interface as a metered connection. (Update: It is also possible to turn off the Windows Update Service
itself in Windows 10 Home) After having configured the WLAN connection
on the ECS LIVA Core to be metered, we set about running our benchmarks.

Testing
out Netflix streaming is a part of our evaluation of the HTPC
credentials of a system. Firing up our test stream in the Windows 10
Netflix app and bringing up the debug information gave us a nasty shock.
Despite being on a 75 Mbps Internet connection, the app was streaming
the test title at a measly 235 kbps. Trying to manually set a higher
buffering bitrate in the Stream Manager (accessible via
Ctrl-Shift-Alt-S) ended up force-quitting the app without any warning.

Windows 10 Netflix App

I immediately searched online and found a Reddit thread
dealing with a similar issue. Initially, I thought that the Netflix app
was buggy (as a previous version on another Windows 10 PC was able to
stream at the maximum bitrate without any issues). In order to rule out
the PC's WLAN connection as the culprit, I fired up Microsoft Edge and
streamed the test title using the HTML 5 interface for Netflix.

Windows 10 - Microsoft Edge - Netflix HTML 5 Streaming

The
title streamed with the maximum video bitrate (similar to the app), but
the audio was only 2.0 at 96 kbps (no Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 stream at
192 kbps).

A few days after finishing up the
benchmarking, the OS threw up a message indicating that it had been a
long time since it had been able to check for updates. That is when it
struck me that the metered connection could have been the culprit for
the behavior of the Netflix app. I immediately tested out with the
network connection set to metered and also with the setting at default
(non-metered)

As
I had guessed, the metered connection indeed turned out to be the
issue. I also confirmed that the metered connection setting had no
effect on the HTML 5 streaming case using Microsoft Edge.

All
in all, the PSA here is that if one sets the network connection to
metered for any purpose, make sure to turn it off if Netflix streaming
at the highest bitrate is required through the Windows 10 app.

The Andyson N500 Titanium PSU Review: High Efficiency For The Common PC
80Plus
Titanium certified PSUs are very rare and most are high output units
that are not meant for normal PCs. Andyson is making a surprise move
with the release of their N Titanium series, which are targeted towards
mainstream users and come with reasonable price tags. Today we are
having a look at the N500 Titanium, the 500W variation of the series, a
unit ideal for typical home and gaming PCs.

When Seagate first announced
the Game Drive for Xbox, they chose Gamescon as a venue to launch the
new product. With the prolific Xbox branding, this is not a drive they
would expect you to purchase for use with your MacBook. Not that you
couldn’t of course, but they seem to have a pretty clearly defined
target market for the Game Drive.

When Microsoft first
launched the Xbox One, it came with a 500 GB internal drive, of which
about 360 GB is available for the end user. Since that time, they have
also released models with 1 TB of internal storage. It is unfortunate
that the Xbox One does not feature an easily replaceable drive, but a
few months after release they added support for external USB drives. The
Seagate Game Drive for Xbox is specifically designed for this role. It
has been certified by Microsoft for use with the Xbox, but mostly it has
been branded with Xbox and colored Xbox green.

The
package comes with just the drive and a micro USB 3.0 cable for use,
which is 18-inches in length. The drive is pre-formatted with NTFS and
if you want you can of course use this as a USB 3.0 storage drive on a
PC as well. Maybe you are an Xbox fan. The drive is powered by the USB
cable as well so there are no other connections necessary.

Configuring
the drive for use with the Xbox is as easy as plugging it in. The Xbox
will detect it and ask if you want to format it for use with games and
content, and you just say yes. Easy as that.

Once
installed on the Xbox it will ask you if you want to use it as the
default save location for new downloads and game installs. The Xbox does
not pool this drive, which makes it slightly more complicated to use
since if you want your existing games there you have to move them.
Pooling would make this seamless for the end user. The advantage of
pooling though is that you can bring your Game Drive with you over to
another Xbox and you will be guaranteed that your games are there, so
you can just start playing.

As
someone who has been around the field for a while, it continues to
amaze me how much storage they can fit into a magnetic platter. The Game
Drive for Xbox is 2 TB (calculated in base 10 for reasons only
marketing would be able to explain) and adds a significant amount of
storage to the Xbox One without being bulky. It is very small and quiet,
being a laptop based drive. There are no cooling fans to fail, or ramp
up in volume.

Performance
of the Game Drive for Xbox is quite good for a small spinning drive.
Read and write speed for sequential files is over 130 MB/s and being a
spinning disk, random workloads fall well below that maximum speed.

The
physical device measures 117mm x 80mm x 14.8mm and weighs 170 grams. It
is actually smaller in person than I expected from the product shots.
The green case is only green on the top, and black underneath. I like
the green, but considering the Xbox One is generally black, it kind of
stands out and doesn’t really match any home theatre equipment.

So
do you need a green USB hard drive for the Xbox? No, of course not.
Considering the package is only a couple of dollars more than Seagate’s
standard 2.5-inch drive USB 3.0 product, I appreciate them trying to
reach out to a different audience than those who just want a basic black
hard drive, and in case you were wondering, it also works with the Xbox
360.